Observability services help you visualize performance and health metrics and analyze potential threats, vulnerabilities and performance issues in your application and IBM Cloud service instances.

IBM Cloud’s observability services help you to trigger alerts and troubleshoot the issues. The following services are available to allow you to track and manage the performance of your IBM Cloud service instances in your account in an efficient way:

• IBM Cloud Activity Tracker helps to gain insights on the state change and investigate the abnormal activities or critical actions of your IBM Cloud service instances.
• IBM Cloud Log Analysis helps to manage both system and application logs for IBM Cloud resources. You can search, filter and tail log data based on your requirements.
• IBM Cloud Monitoring provides visualisation of the performance metrics and health for your IBM Cloud service instances. It helps in monitoring and troubleshooting the performance issues faced.

You can deploy these monitoring and logging services in your IBM Cloud account with a single click and enjoy the benefits of these services by using the IBM Cloud Terraform modules.

Deploying the monitoring and logging services in IBM Cloud Schematics

You can use Terraform-based automation to provision observability services in your IBM Cloud account. For more information about Terraform templates, see “IBM Cloud Terraform template for observability services.”

The following diagram illustrates the deployment architecture used by this automation:

You can onboard this Terraform template to your IBM Cloud private catalog by following the steps mentioned in the IBM Cloud Schematics documentation. You can then provision the observability services from the private catalog to create an IBM Cloud Schematics workspace. On successful completion, you can see IBM Cloud Monitoring, IBM Cloud Logging and IBM Cloud Activity Tracker services up and running in the resource list.

Using the monitoring and logging services

In IBM Cloud Log Analysis, you can configure the instance to receive platform logs from enabled service instances across IBM Cloud. To view platform logs, you can connect sources by adding agents to your desired resources. You can view the dashboard and create new boards as per your requirements. You can also import or export configurations by using a JSON file containing any combination of Views (including Filters), Alerts, Boards, Screens, Exclusion rules and Parsing templates.

The following image depicts the list of logging instances and their statuses. You can also click the View IBM Log Analysis link to view the dashboard:

In IBM Cloud Monitoring, you have the option to configure the platform metrics by choosing which IBM Cloud Monitoring instance will receive platform metrics from the enabled service instances across IBM Cloud. You can add agents to your desired resource to enable platform metrics. In the dashboard, you can also add multiple dashboards and customize the configuration as per your requirements, or you can select from the available dashboard templates. It also offers option to share your dashboards with your team. You can add alerts by selecting the type of alert you want to define with other configurable options.

The following image depicts the monitoring instance and its status. You can also click the View IBM Log Monitoring link to view the dashboard:

In IBM Cloud Activity Tracker, you can access the logs and investigate the critical activities from the dashboard. Like IBM Cloud Log Analysis, IBM Cloud Activity Tracker also allows you to create dashboards and screens. You can also define alerts and enable your IBM Cloud Activity Tracker events to stream directly into IBM Event Streams.

The following image depicts the Activity Tracker instance and its status. You can also click the View IBM Log Analysis link to view the Activity Tracker dashboard:

Learn more

Terraform templates help you to simplify the process of provisioning and configuring IBM Cloud resources. Observability services provides you one-step solution for all the logging, tracking and monitoring activities.

To explore Terraform templates, see IBM Cloud Terraform modules.

To contribute to the existing IBM Terraform modules or create new modules, see IBM Cloud getting started repository.